Give peace a chance
Modern warfare requires modern weaponry, which the West showed can turn the tides of war in favor of disadvantaged military forces like Ukraine’s.
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Daily TribuneModern warfare requires modern weaponry, which the West showed can turn the tides of war in favor of disadvantaged military forces like Ukraine’s.
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A news wire agency dubbed 2022 as the "Year of Living Dangerously" in a year ender article that harped heavily on Russia's largely unsuccessful invasion of Ukraine starting in February.
As the late John Lennon's Happy Xmas (War is Over) song gets to be played again on the radio with the holidays just around the corner, the singular hope of Ukrainians is for peace to reign once again.
That's hoping against hope as long as the madman of Moscow, President Vladimir Putin, remains in power as the Russian bear goes unchallenged at home just like Xi Jinping in China.
The year 2022 will go in mere weeks and 2023 will usher itself in, with nations gearing up for an end to the Covid-19 pandemic. But no paradigm shift could be expected with the new year when it comes to man's innate nature to go to war.
The bad news for peaceniks is that, according to the Agence France-Presse, the sale of arms and military services grew in 2021 even before Russia got to put boots into the ground in Ukraine.
However, the good news for dovish people is that worldwide supply issues related to Covid tempered the production of new weapons. Surmise, we can, that those weapons sold in 2021 and 2022 to power Russia's attack on Ukraine and the latter's defense of its cities came from old stockpiles.
As pointed out by executives of tech companies who recently converged in Boracay for the VSTECS CXO Innovation Summit, supply-side disruptions had affected nearly all industries, from computer to car manufacturers, which all use silicon wafers or chips in their products.
Modern warfare requires modern weaponry, which the West showed can turn the tides of war in favor of disadvantaged military forces like Ukraine's. Many Russian tanks, jet fighters and attack helicopters had been reduced to twisted metals by modern shoulder-fired weapons wielded by Ukrainians to great effect.
And so, 2023 may hold great hope for ending the pandemic, but not for peace in Europe with the Russian-Ukrainian war of attrition not being seen to end in the near future.
"The top 100 arms companies sold weapons and related services totaled $592 billion in 2021, 1.9 percent more than the year before, said the latest report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute," the AFP report said, pointing out that the growth was "severely impacted by widespread supply chain issues."
It added that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is expected to worsen supply chain issues as Putin's country is a major supplier of raw materials used in making armaments. The supreme irony, however, is that Putin's war has also increased demand for the tools of killing.
The report predicted a substantial increase in demand for war materiel as the "countries that have sent weapons to Ukraine to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars will be looking to replenish stockpiles. Secondly, the worsening security environment means 'countries are looking to procure more weapons.'"
"Companies in the US continue to dominate global arms production, accounting for over half, $299 billion, of global sales and 40 of the top companies. Meanwhile, sales from the eight largest Chinese arms companies rose 6.3 percent to $109 billion in 2021. European companies took 27 of the spots on the top 100, with combined sales of $123 billion, up 4.2 percent compared to 2020," the report said.
What is doubly worrying about the study is the emerging trend in the last three or four years of private equity firms buying up arms companies that "threatens to make the arms industry more opaque and therefore harder to track… because private equity firms will buy these companies and then essentially not produce any more financial records."
A bigger threat to global peace than flourishing arms traders are merchants of war who'd hide behind equity firms to evade accountability not only on raking in billions of dollars in profit but, worse, in having no qualms selling their weapons to anyone who can pay — even to rogue states.
